How the House in Don't Breathe Was Created

The scariest movie of the year is almost entirely set in one location. The set designer tells us how it was built.

By
Rae Nudson

Oct 26, 2016

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

With creaking staircases, resident spirits, and screams in the night, haunted houses are the perfect setting for scary movies and ghost stories alike. But some of the best haunted houses in horror cinema don't have ghosts at all. Instead, they are haunted with characters' pasts, bad decisions, and (often) seriously ugly wallpaper. One of this year's best horror movies, Don't Breathe, features one of those houses—haunted by a monster that lives within who is entirely human.

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Based in Detroit and mirroring the city's state of neglect and disrepair, the house in Don't Breathe is home to a character known only as the Blind Man. When three friends try to break in to steal the $300,000 they heard he has locked away, they expect the Blind Man's house to be an easy target. But once inside, they find a home that reflects the Blind Man's mind, with dark corners that hold darker secrets. (You can see it for yourself on November 8 when Don't Breathe is available digitally, or when it's out on DVD on November 29.)

The house in the movie is a real home in Detroit, though the interior and exterior were also built as sets in Budapest, where most of the movie was filmed. We gave production designer Naaman Marshall a call to talk about the process of turning a regular, lived in home into one of the scariest houses in horror.

ESQ: One thing I thought was particularly notable was how much the house told us about the Blind Man who lived there. How did the character of the Blind Man inform the design of the house?

Naaman Marshall: There was really a back story on the Blind Man, and how he became blind and what he did prior that we all kind of sat around and came up with, which then was able to influence how I was could implement different ideas into the house. We always felt like this Blind Man was capable and able to take care of himself. So a lot of the stuff in the house, the story being told through it, was that this guy is someone that, although he was blind, retrofitted the house to how he needed it—he was able to keep up with the house as well as he possibly could.

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We treated him like somebody who had no reason to get out of the house, so it did become his fortress. The challenge was to make it feel claustrophobic without the clichés—moving stuff around and putting walls in certain areas. We started with the basic architecture of a house in Detroit, and then we all sat at the table and essentially storyboarded the film within our house. It was like the ideas had to come from the architecture as opposed to the other way, and that's how we played with it.

To me it felt like the house became almost a character. Rather than just being a passive setting for the movie, it actively seemed to fight back against intruders. Were you consciously trying to make the house come alive, and what went into that?

Absolutely. For one, the Blind Man didn't speak more than 15 or 20 lines in the film, so we knew that he and his house became the character combined. It was really telling a story through how he booby-trapped the house, and how he created locks on certain doors, or he didn't use certain rooms of the house so he just stockpiled those with stuff that was unnecessary.

My fear was that being in the house for a whole film, the audience would get bored with it, or complacent. So every room we went into had to have a little bit of a story so that if you were watching the film you could figure it out, and rewatch it and see the little quirks and the little tchotchkes and set dressing bits.

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I feel like there's been some great horror recently where a lot of the movie is taking place in one house, like in The Invitation or The Babadook. Why do you think that's so effective for horror movies?

When you put a house as the main character or the main set piece, you actually feel like you need to start studying it, and you feel like you want to figure a way out. So that was the key was that once you were in that house you needed to feel like you were trying to figure a way out throughout the film like, "Oh, why didn't they do that, why didn't they go out that window?" And I feel like [director Fede Alvarez] did a good job of being able to as much as possible put an end to the theories of "why didn't they" and "how did they get stuck in there" and all of that. When you're set in one location, you become a lot more invested in the set.

I thought the way Don't Breathe used silence and sound was really effective. How did sound factor into your production design—did you have to think about quiet hiding spots or what might come crashing down?

You never really know how the sound is going to play into it until you get in the cutting room and do all of that. Once we got into the design of the house it was important to me to keep it as authentic as possible so you could feel like the floors, for instance, squeaked, or when they got into the crawl space and you felt like you could hear the echoing underneath and that there was no insulation in those old homes. When I was designing the house I wanted it to feel as if it had the layers of the old and the new to be able to play off of—like the squeaking doors, and glass hitting the ground in the bathroom with the tile, and the idea that we put the house on an extremely desolate street in Detroit.

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I don't think people realize how on the particular street that we chose this house; it was one of two houses inhabited on that street. So when we went to that street, we knew it was a quiet street. We knew that there was nothing going on. And then we based our theories and our principles off of that.

How long did it take you to find that house?

It took a couple weeks of scouting, and then we all got in a van and we cruised around to 10 houses in Detroit and did the pluses and minuses on all of them. We landed on this one for the fact that it was great Detroit architecture, very typical. It felt like it was a house that the Blind Man would be comfortable in, in an area that didn't have much communication with the outside world.

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Was the inside of the house not actually terrifying?

No, not for a moment. It was a split-level house, and it had a mom that lived upstairs and the son lived downstairs, and that was their pride and joy. They've been there since the '60s and they watched the whole neighborhood fall apart around them. They were still very proud of the house and had a lot of really good stories.

Did seeing the house in real life affect your design in any way or was it completely separate to you?

Of course it does. I always enjoy picking real locations and then either building a mock of that or using that for inspiration because you get some of the weird nuances of houses that have been lived in for so long. So once we got into that house, I say that we created a whole interior, but it was based on the real one. And the design of it was based on the real one. And I think that's why it worked so well was that we didn't stray too far from that.

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You also did production design for The Visit, which is another movie where people were trapped in a house trying to escape. How did your approaches differ?

The approaches differed in the sense of the house in The Visit really wasn't scary at all, and you kind of didn't want it to feel so scary as much as you wanted to be surprised at what happened. This house, on the other hand, was based on Detroit, and Detroit in itself, in the particular neighborhoods where we are, you can imagine how scary some of these houses are. Going into it, I knew that I had the license to push a little bit on the design of the interior and the decrepitness of it.

And not to mention, just the idea that blind people live their lives differently in ways that you just don't understand. Like tripping hazards are a big deal for blind people, so they take extra precautions. I duct taped rugs down to the floor where they needed to be. The glasses I chose in the house had real heavy bottoms on them because that's something typical that we learned that blind people will do: have heavy bases to stuff so that everything isn't a tipping hazard, or that kind of idea. The idea that this guy knew his house front to back, and when he charges through the house, you feel as if he knows every step. He knows it's four steps to the hallway, two up the stairs, and he could get around really easy.

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Was there any part of the house that gave you particular trouble to figure out?

Well I wouldn't say it was particular trouble but the basement. There was such an action sequence in there of cat and mouse that it really required a lot of storyboarding. I made a model of it, and we all sat around and kind of shifted pieces around and talked our way through that sequence of the basement in order to make it feel like we could get lost and that we could get disoriented. It wasn't difficult, it just required all of us, including the DP and the director, just sitting down and figuring out, is this enough? Are we going to feel like we can't get out of here as easily as you'd think?

I think that was so effective. Especially, like you were saying, that feeling of disorientation added so much to the movie, so I thought that was really well done.

And that's what was fun about the film. You did kind of forget where you came in, or where the exits are. We made a conscious decision to take the staircase out that leads from the living room down to the basement to make it feel like he's created this system of if this ever happened, or if she ever tried to get out. Most people wouldn't take note of all that, but I think when you combine all of those ideas together, then all of a sudden it becomes something.

I also saw you were the art director on Westworld for one of the episodes. Even though it's outside, Westworld is essentially another story about people being trapped somewhere they can't escape. Did anything you did on Don't Breathe transfer to an environment like Westworld?

Yes and no. I think just like anything else when you're immersed in a film, and you believe the film and you believe where you're at, it becomes a lot more authentic with the feelings of being trapped. With Westworld, it was really important to us, although it's sci fi and also a western, to make it all feel very real. And the idea that once you're there you don't have to second guess is this real, is this good, is it any of that. We just pushed to make each set—and that's what I try to typically do—is make each set feel as if it doesn't have to come into question as you're watching the film.

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